Positioning and related services are increasingly important to cellular network operators, network subscribers, advertisers, and others. Smart phones and other intelligent mobile devices with GPS receivers offer significant new opportunities for exploiting subscriber location information in various contexts. Some of these contexts relate to commercial activities, e.g., location-based marketing and advertising, while others relate to emergency services, law enforcement operations, and mobility management or other network-centric operations.
In turn, a given network may have a number of different positioning methods that are generally available to it, for use in responding to positioning requests. For example, the positioning methods generally available for use in positioning may include one or more GPS-based methods that rely on GPS satellite signals, along with one or more time-of-arrival and/or angle-of-arrival methods that rely on the reception of terrestrial radio signals at (or from) multiple network radio nodes fixed at known locations. Of course, these are non-limiting examples and the general point is that multiple positioning methods may be available at any given time, for responding to a given positioning request.
However, because the new service possibilities do not have uniform performance in terms of their accuracy, response time, etc., there is a need to accurately select the positioning method(s) to be used, to meet the applicable positioning Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements that are associated with any given positioning request. Known positioning selection logic uses the requested positioning QoS (e.g., in terms of the requested positioning time, the requested (horizontal) accuracy and/or the requested vertical accuracy) in comparison with preconfigured, fixed positioning QoS values representing the performance of each of the various positioning methods. (Hereinafter, the use of “QoS” will be used to refer to “positioning QoS,” unless otherwise noted.)
In particular, these stored QoS values generally are fixed or otherwise defined on a network-wide basis. That approach fails to recognize that a given positioning method may perform significantly better or worse, given the particulars of the operating environment in which it is applied.